Why Hardcore Full Loot PVP MMOs Fail

General Discussion General Discussion
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Imagine seriously responding to someone based on some quick web searches and long quotes rather than personal knowledge. Star Citizen actually is primarily an MMO. It has some additional game modes and they are also developing a single player story game, but the main game (“persistent universe”) is absolutely an MMO. A full loot PVP MMO.

I wouldn’t quote Kotaku on the best color of panties for a man to wear, let alone what they said in September of 2016 about something being “vaporware”. They are as far from serious gaming journalists as possible.

Close to ~$400M funding says you’re off the mark here, and as far as vaporware the game is playable now and there are ongoing releases so it is pretty much the opposite of vaporware. If we are talking about what is possible and where games are heading I think Star Citizen is at the top of the list.

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EVE’s crime system is a model for what could be done. The more you move toward a simulation the more things solve themselves, like in the real world. The problems with PVP are mostly related to incomplete game mechanics or poor loot/gear balance etc.

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Yeah i want an albion like game that isnt a shit top down game that promotes ganking, so do a lot of people. Whats wrong with segmenting the server? They do that anyways with tons of stuff… crafting, pve, world pvp, instanced pvp, gathering, housing etc

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The problem is that open world PvP inherently promotes ganking. If you want fair fights, you need structured PvP like arenas. But the full loot PvP group complain about that.

The problem is that what you want is full loot PvP with some kind of honorable solo (or fair fight) PvP system. That’s simply impossible to implement without it being broken.

If a group has 10-20 people, and then 3 people want to PvP with 3v3 fights in open PvP, how do you determine which 3 of the 10-20 people get to 3v3? You need a flagging system, which is anti-open PvP. If you auto-flag the first 3 people attacked, then the small 3 man group can focus whoever they want and largely ignore the stronger players.

What you want is paradoxical and cannot be feasibly implemented.

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I’m sorry, but it’s hard to play a game that has been in development for almost ten years. And I’m not giving a company money just to test a game that may or may not be released. That’s all you are doing right now.

It’s not just that one writer. MANY people have had issues with broken promises and getting refunds. The lawsuits have been covered quite extensively.

Close to ~$400M funding says you’re off the mark here, and as far as vaporware the game is playable now and there are ongoing releases so it is pretty much the opposite of vaporware. If we are talking about what is possible and where games are heading I think Star Citizen is at the top of the list.

It’s been collecting money since it first opened for crowdfunding back nine years ago. Big deal. How much of that is left to finish the game?

And if by “playable” you mean “paying to test their game” then… yeah okay.

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I think I’d rather stick to logic, not to a guy talking on YT, because if he would call banana a salad, would you also call it that way?

I did the enromously painful act of googling out few titles and:

UO - 17k peak this year on official servers, not sure if I can count some statistics from internet though. Private servers which are pearls actually, have probably the same(checked few first on list and they had 1k+ players) keep in mind that there are servers that aren’t getting listed because they don’t know about it, don’t want to, don’t show online etc.

Day-z - Which even isn’t an mmo 34k just on steam. There are plenty of games like Day-z by the way

Conan - Has 6k only on steam

Even tibia is above 15k and I named just few titles.

As to financials…I don’t wanna get through all of them so I’ve checked Grinding Gear Games(Path of Exile) financial report. $108m just on selling skins and merch for year 2020…

Now I don’t want to pull out some serious heresy out here, but perhaps people should actually do more research before doing YT videos telling how niche is the population and incomes, when they probably even didn’t touch the games, they just googled it and did it wrong?

I was there with full loot games, I still do play them. Fun fact - They work for both PVE and PVP, they are not dead. What makes these games still playable? Many things, and I really mean it. You need to make your game attractive so that those typical crybabies that have a problem because there is no minimap and they get lost, or game doesn’t play for them and they need to do something, can reconsider their behaviour and come back. This is how games worked back in the day, you were literally smashed either by too hard riddles, too much skill required to do something, or players. But people still did play these games because they liked lots of elements in them. Saying that one feature kills the game, is literally saying the game is bad in general, because you can’t stick to anything else.

Going back to main arguments - Low player populations? Sure, I threw only few ones and summing them up you would get 100k total pop and not even from all servers, because there is also a big difference between official servers, which very often are fked up by team creating them wink and private servers, developed by people that don’t count on money but fun - And these are way better. It could be more, Imagine if only a good 3d, well visually made game, with good sounds, systems, engaging pvp, demanding pve and way more systems would be out there…would one system kill the game? I don’t think so.

Why people still bring arguments how full loot is a bad thing while I saw literally no one ever saying that he wants to turn NW to full loot ? I don’t know, but there is a term called attention wh…

Anyway, personally I think that NW Will never be a full loot because A) Team lacks balls to do that and B) They lack skill to do that.

Full loot game will die for sure if you won’t make a game designed to that feature, which means literally reshaping all systems we got currently in game. Economy, Combat system, PVE, even things like picking up items, item obscuring by objects/players etc… everything would have to be changed, to be functional. No one will do that.

What I would like to see is the full loot zones or rare material drop as high risk high reward things like in Alpha end game over 3 years ago was better than this - But reshaped. I believe, and I think I can put my faith in people here, that whenever someone said he wants full loot, he meant a system like mentioned in the post. Not global game change to be always marked on full loot.

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I know I sound like a broken record, but one thing I do like about Albion Online is how Yellow zone PvP works. Unless you are faction flagged in a yellow zone, if you are PvP flagged when you die to another player rather than dropping all your loot, you’ll just drop a percentage of the resources you have on hand. This is a much more balanced form of Loot PvP imo. And could actually make open world PvP nominally more worth doing in NW.

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Literally untrue, it can be completely fair, i explained how and even if you dont wanna do what i said, you could copy albions hellgates, different gates spawn around the map, some are 1v1, 2v2, 5v5 etc. You go into them and go against random players, its a small instanced area with a few mobs 2 bosses that drop decent loot and a chest that drops decent loot i think. You pretty much inevitably fight the other team and they drop like half their loot and the other half gets destroyed randomly for a nice gold sink so gear isnt constantly being made and looted and never destroyed. The way they do it is far, and gets rid of ganking. I forgot how they made it so people couldnt que snipe eachother and just farm the bosses for loot and not kill eachother but even if that was a problem you could just take out the bosses and loot and only the winning team in pvp would get the loot. Its a system that works and would fit in the game easily, if people dont like that content, dont do it, doesn’t affect you.

Secondly the other main thing i want is arena pvp so when you say people want one or the other thats a lie, both are small instanced areas that can be easily added to the game and would be play driven endless endgame content.

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They don’t fail or die they get niche communities that stick with them, but the downside is it does affect growth or trying to appeal to a wider audience usually. In an age with pvp games everywhere though I’d struggle to understand why so many think it’d fail.

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Something people always fail to remember or understand about Eves concurrent player stats is that 90% of players multibox.
There is one guy who was in Goons last time I was playing who had 50 Rorqual accounts that he multiboxed. Was hilarious when that fleet got ganked, but he had made so much ISK from it he had the fleet replaced almost immediately.

I personally ran with six accounts for mining and ratting.

Its not uncommon for people to have slave accounts whose only purpose is to sit in junction systems to monitor Local for hostile entries while the other accounts PvE safely.

Oh and before you all nut over the supposed lawlessness of Nullsec, players turned Nullsec into one of the safest places in the game.

You show up with a Fleet in TEST or Goonspace, prepare to have the Titan hammer dropped on your head if you so much as scratch the paint on a mining fleet.

I lost count of the number of threads exactly like this one was posted to the Eve forums whinging that Nullsec was a carebear haven and demanding for CCP to “fix” the game so they could just pick up free kills whenever they wanted as if they had a right to it.

So when you see that 20k+ concurrent accounts… You need to remember just how many players are multiboxing and that PVE is the literal backbone of that game.
Without the Industry guys doing Mining, shipbuilding and Planetary Interaction (All things that the hated “carebears” do) there would be no ships for people to PvP in and without the ratters making ISK magically appear in wallets, there would be no ISK with which people buy the stuff PVP players loot from their kills.

People like to proclaim that EVE is a hardcore PvP MMO but totally ignore that the entire game is held up on the shoulders of people who primarily PVE and only PvP to defend their stuff.

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Yes, star citizen is full loot pvp focused game. AND if it ever becomes an MMO (as in will have more than 50 players per server) and if it ever becomes playable for wider audience, it will crash and burn spectacularly precisely because it is hardcore pvp full loot. It will get its loyal following for sure but it will be a very far cry from the current 2M+ registered accounts, I would predict less than 200k, so again 1/10 of the average PVE focused MMO population.
What amazes me is why do many indy devs still try to build a pvp focused game knowing full well the best they can hope for are the literal scraps of the target market? Make a western version of FFXIV with good graphics, good combat, good story and you will be printing money on expansions alone. Yes, your PVE audience will not play all the time they will leave once the content is finished, but who cares - you just sell expansions when they are ready and the audience will come back for each expansion.
It really must be the “bro” culture at all those gaming studios that makes them try to build a “bro” game and fail again and again and again

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There are lots of mechanics that can counter ganking lowbies and unfair fights, like exponentially increasing criminal status, bounties, and guards that hunt down gankers. Maybe it would need to involve a bit of AI and machine learning as well. But to say it is “impossible”, “paradoxical” and “cannot feasibly be implemented” is an absurdly strong and patently false statement. Almost any time I see a “that’s impossible” or “that will never happen” it is some grotesque hyperbole that itself is impossible.

“Man will never set foot on the moon.”
“Computers will never have real time ray tracing.”
“Moore’s law is impossible to sustain.”

All these kind of statements are garbage. People need to learn handy statements like “probably”, “unlikely”, “difficult to imagine”, “require groundbreaking technology”, “involve a quantum leap”, etc. rather that say things like “never”, “impossible” and “paradoxical”.

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PVP mmo’s fail because their are two types of people in this world: Wolves, and sheep.

When the wolves constantly take the sheeps lunch money, they pack up and leave. Less people, less money. Pretty easy to understand.

That said, it doesnt mean we cant have servers dedicated to wolves, no matter what you people may think the percentage of population that may be.

At the end of the day, it boils down to the state of our culture in the world right now. Strength used to be a virtue, and being tough meant surviving. These days the weak are allowed to survive because theyre lifted on the shoulders of the strong.

Its not a problem with gaming, its a problem with the culture. I hate to make it a political thing, but you know exactly what I’m driving at here.

tl;dr theres a lot more soft pussies than there were 20 years ago when pvp mmo’s thrived.

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You don’t wrestle wolves outdoors bro. You sit at a computer. Like the rest of us.

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Most of the top games are either competitive PVP or full loot permadeath PVP or something along those lines. Fortnite, Warzone, Apex, PUBG (not to mention DayZ and others) are all full loot. Hell, in Minecraft you drop your loot where you die. LoL has been the most popular game (on and off I guess) for a while and it is very competitive.

I don’t think it’s gaming. I think it is MMO players if anything. It’s become a safe space where you don’t have to “git gud” and don’t have to worry about losing, just get participation awards.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

What is it with the full loot crowd and their constant desire to denigrate players and brag about their epeens? It’s just a game. Get over yourselves.

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